Photosynthesis

Weigh a young oak sapling, plant it, come back thirty years later and weigh the tree. It has gained tonnes. Dig up the soil around it and weigh that too: almost nothing has gone. So where did the tree come from? Overwhelmingly, from thin air and rainwater, assembled by a reaction that runs on sunlight inside the green cells of its leaves.

This lesson takes you through that reaction. You will write both equations for photosynthesis, find out exactly what chlorophyll does with the light it catches, and learn why the rate of the reaction so often stalls even in bright sun. You will then use that idea where it actually earns money: inside a commercial greenhouse, where a grower has to decide whether paying for extra heat, extra light or extra carbon dioxide will return more in crop than it costs in fuel. Photosynthesis is one of only three biology required practicals on this course, and it is the only topic in Bioenergetics that both specimen papers examine as a question of its own, so the investigation work in this note is worth as much as the theory.